Daniel Robbins, original creator of the Gentoo project, offers a solution to fix the recent leadership crisis at Gentoo: "I have received permission from my employer to return and serve as President of the Gentoo Foundation, renew its charter, and then work in some capacity to help to get Gentoo going in the right direction from a legal, community and technical perspective."

I agree with the value of documentation. Another place gentoo could will provide a lot of value to other communities is really when it comes to the processes they develop for quality assurance.

My understanding and experience has always been that when compiling from source you get to uncover more design flaws and obscure bugs than other cases. With good documentation, which they are somewhat known for now and a focus on developing guidelines for proper quality assurance, regression/unit testing and effective bug reporting I think they so much more to offer.

I talk as someone who used gentoo and see how that experience helped me along the way. Also one should never under estimate the value of having access to knowledgeable people who are willing to share their wisdom and understanding, none of this our way or the high way crap I seem to be picking up.

In the early day’s gentoo was more about sharing advanced concepts in a down to earth manner with tips and articles and options presented to with a clear explanation of the differences (why you may want to use this kernel, that logging application or a host of other alternatives). I am not sure how pervasive the recent trends of removing options instead of accommodating choose and waiting out instead of embracing new advances is but it feels nothing like what it used to.